Thanks Allolex, the perfect response for me. Will follow up your suggestions.

I still don't understand why questions of permissions/authentication/security don't belong in a Perl forum as I've run into all three problems while coding, but I will take PerlMonks word for it as I am a relative new comer/amateur at coding perl.

There are a lot of areas where different skills overlap. In order to run a web server, you might have to have knowledge about server software, HTML, and a language for creating dynamic content. I guess it's safe to say that most residents of the Perl Monestary are working toward making this site really good for the Perl programming language, with excellent and/or productive advice at every turn. The monks want to avoid giving mediocre advice on other areas.

More specifically for you, setting up your server correctly with Apache authentication is a prerequisite to running Perl on your server (If I guessed right about your motivation.), but it has to do with the ins and outs of Apache. If you had asked how to set up authentication using Perl and CGI, you would have gotten a completely different response. Have a look at this node. (Then again because that node already has some really good answers, you probably would have been told to use Super Search, look at the Tutorials, and have a look at jeffa's node "How (Not) To Ask A Question".)